my UXDi adventure

Tales from inside GA's 10-week User Experience Design Immersive course in Boston.

[brittanyjoyjack]

For your UX entertainment... This quite possibly the most best way to spend your down time

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my portfolio is up and running!

UX Designer Portfolio

[panotypalmas]

Last day of UXDI @generalassembly Boston!!! We did it!! (at General Assembly, 51 Melcher Street)

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We did it! Woo

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Yesterday we went onsite to visit our clients at The Boston Globe to discuss the next steps for our project. Our assignment was to redesign the weather page on their site, and do so for the audience of people living and/or working in Boston. Throughout the whole process, we had to keep in mind that we were representing “the voice of Boston” through the weather page. 

This project was challenging and exciting since it was the first time we were working directly with real clients, so in a way we felt like a small UX agency. We also focused a great deal on conducting thorough user interviews and user testing. Hopefully our findings will serve as useful information for the boston.com team. Tomorrow we present our final project! 

[gabostonuxdi-blog]

Great start to our Halloween with a Creative Mornings chat. Thank you, Michael Schaeffer of Bold & Co.!

[brittanyjoyjack]

Amazing and insightful talk with Creative Mornings!

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project #5: research & word clouds

One of our goals for this project was to get a sense of the "voice of Boston". To see what Bostonians had to say, we thought we'd straight out ask them some open-ended questions in our survey (amongst other things). We asked people to tell us what they LOVED about Boston. Here is word cloud summarizing their responses:

Next we asked what came to mind when they thought about weather in Boston:

Besides proving how fun word clouds can be, this exercise was very helpful in getting a literally sense of the "voice" of the city (or at least a sample of the city). Our group took these results into consideration when thinking about the information architecture of the webpage and deciding what features to make primary, secondary, or leave out.  

[brittanyjoyjack]

A UX movie night

[gabostonuxdi-blog]

Go teams go! Day 3 of project 5 done :)

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Brainstorming and bonding during project 5

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project #5: motivators

During undergrad I majored in psychology, so I love when I can make connections between social psychology and marketing/ advertising/UX design. Today, we had amazing guest speaker Amy Bucher, PhD talk with us about motivational behaviors and the self-determination theory. We talked about how we, as UX designers, can motivate others to successfully use products by encouraging competence, autonomy, and relatedness. 

I thought how these ideas can be applied in project #5. We are redesigning the boston.com weather webpage, and I'm brainstorming ways of how we can make weather more relatable and personal. One of our main goals is to make the site more engaging, so I've also been researching some websites that do this effectively and to see if we can adapt any similar features onto a weather site.

[brittanyjoyjack]

Brainstorming for our final project with Boston.com!

[gabostonuxdi-blog]

Final project interviews with steak holders!

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Everyone thinks I’m crazy, because I am

Chelsea Evans

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branding

Exploring our personal brands has been one of the most fun and challenging parts of the UXDi course so far. I absolutely loved playing around with the color scheme, typefaces, and voice of my brand. I began by basing my branding off of my mood board, and using handy tools like Adobe's Kuler to play around with color wheels. However, once I started tinkering around with it, it was easy to get caught up in the fine details. Changing the hue of one color can quickly snowball into changing every color so they still fit together, and you could run the risk of changing the whole vibe you were originally going for. There is no right or wrong answer to finding your personal brand, and there were so many different routes I could take. At the end of the day, I was pretty happy with my end result. However, this is a constant work in progress, and I am working on improving my Photoshop and Illustrator skills to design a personal logo as well. 

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As always, cheating is encouraged

Matt Brendzel

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mood boards

Yesterday we did an incredibly fun and insightful exercise: creating our own mood boards. We had 30 minutes to pull together images we thought would represent our personal brand and create a sort of personality Pinterest poster. After working on the projects independently, we all displayed our boards and tried to guessed which classmate made each board. It was fascinating to listen to others analyze and dissect my personalized collage, and to hear what words came to their mind versus the look and feel I was going for. After creating the board, there were obvious themes and similar hues that kept appearing that I hadn't noticed on a conscious level. The class called out some of the following words about my board: comfort, traditional, subtle, warm, homey, caring, adventurous, subdued, humorous. 

[beautifultype]

Really nice lettering illustration from Pavlov Visuals. Found on Dribbble via From Up North.

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